never absent from the minds of Henry’s counsellors in their dealings with his transmarine dominions. Besides Poitou and Gascony, the Duchy of Aquitaine included four counties whose rulers owed homage and obedience to the Duke as their suzerain: Angoulême, La Marche, Limoges, and Périgord. Two of these stood, during the early years of the thirteenth century, in relations to each other and to their common overlord which gave them a special importance in the politics of the Duchy. The county of Angoulême was the heritage of Queen Isabel, John’s wife and Henry’s mother. La Marche belonged to Hugh of Lusignan, to whose eldest son Isabel had been betrothed in her infancy, under whose care she had been brought up, and from whose house her own father had literally stolen her, a child scarce twelve years old, {1200} to marry her to the King of England. Between the houses of Lusignan and of Anjou there was already, even at that date, a smouldering feud of some years’ standing, which this outrage, of course, aggravated, but which was allayed for a time in 1214 by John’s promise of little Joan, his eldest daughter by Isabel of Angoulême, as wife to the younger Hugh in her mother’s stead. Joan was then four years old. Her bridegroom--known simply as “Hugh of Lusignan,” his father being Hugh, Count of La Marche--was a young man in the prime of life,[621] gifted with an ample share of the stirring, ambitious, acquisitive spirit which characterized his race. That race was famous alike in legend and in history, and had reached the height of its greatness within the lifetime of the reigning count of La Marche, two of whose brothers had been crowned and anointed Kings.[622] Another brother, Ralf, was in right of his wife count of Eu in Normandy and owner of some lands in England. In 1218 the elder Hugh went to the Crusade; and thus when Geoffrey de Neville took up the government of Poitou and Gascony, the younger Hugh was for practical purposes count of La Marche, and the most important personage in northern Aquitaine. He and Joan were still only betrothed, not married; but she was in his custody, and he was officially treated as “brother” to King Henry; he had claims against the English Crown respecting certain lands which John had promised to him at his betrothal;[623] and when his uncle Ralf of Eu died childless in the spring of 1219, he seems to have also--no doubt on behalf of his father--laid claim to Ralf’s estates, and taken a high-handed method of enforcing his demand, by picking a quarrel with the King’s town of Niort. Geoffrey de Neville tried to mediate, and promised to procure him satisfaction for any complaint that he might have against the town, “but,” writes Geoffrey to the King, “he answered that he would not cease from infesting your land for us or for anybody else.” Geoffrey had now been seneschal for a year, and was confessedly at his wit’s end and eager to be rid of an office in which he foresaw nothing but failure and disgrace.